Leaping into the unknown, living on the edge of uncertainty

Our group officially swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers on Thursday, October 27th and there are now 48 more PCVs on the loose in Bulgaria. This could be dangerous! ;P Peace loving people are taking over the mailto:overthecountry@news.com Maitap, maitap (translation: joke, joke, put the squirt guns down and let's hug each other)

Before all this happened, (all absurdity aside) I have to mention that our Krichim group completed a kick-ass (excuse my language, but it was really that good!)clean-up project involving more than a hundred kids, teachers from all the schools (thanks to director Kapka Shapkova), and a very helpful specialist from the municipality (Georgi Markov) who secured game equipment for our after-cleaning celebration. As part of the project, every class in the elementary school did a drawing project around the theme "We love Krichim and we keep it clean". The drawings are fabulous and are now hanging in the school, as a constant reminder to take showers. Just kidding, it's actually a reminder to put trash in bins rather than in the river, on the street, in the field, on cars, etc. We also put together a little info sheet for all the teachers in all the schools on how much time different trash items take to break down. The sheets are laminated and can be put up and used in education year after year. That helps with sustainability of a project! You get bonus points with Peace Corps when you add sustainability into the equation.

To top off the educational part of our project, we did a hands-on clean up of the town on October 23rd with about 100 kids. The Eco-Club of Krichim, under the coordination of the super-enthusiastic, idea-filled Gospozha Slavova, made little emblems for everyone to wear that said, "We love Krichim and keep it clean" With so many kids, as you may imagine, the day was fairly chaotic. But, we got a lot of cleaning done, we planted a seed of inspiration (the kids got enthusiastic about cleaning and even started competing amongst each other about who cleaned up the most trash), and afterwards we played games in the stadium. Trevor led soccer, Jack and Freddy played frisbee, Rhonda got snacks for the kids (the local grocery store donated a big bag of treats), Andy and Maria took lots of pictures (that i will put on this blog soon), I played a Bulgarian game called 'Drop the handkerchief', which we retitled 'Drop the trash in the bin'. The weather was absolutely perfect. Sunny, warm, the whole day was just perfect. It was a wonderful finale to our stay in Krichim.

Then, on October 26th we had to say goodbye to our host families and to our PC Krichim group. It was a sad day. The next day, we swore in. There was a feeling of uncertainty and anticipation in the air as everyone was coming to terms with starting anew at their permanent site, leaping into the unknown once again, as we had in the very beginning, in the very act of joining Peace Corps. Anna Franklin, one of our PC groupies, gave an amazing, sophisticated speech that was all in Bulgarian. That's quite an accomplishment, considering that our group's been studying Bulgarian for only about two months.

After the ceremony, we all split off in different directions. After spending a few days in Sofia to inhale a few times (after the wild spur of activity called Peace Corps Training), I've been settling in to life in Momchilgrad. The people I've met here so far have been incredibly kind, welcoming, and helpful. I haven't been here for very long and it may take some time to adapt, but i can visualize calling this place home. The leaves on the trees are brilliant with the colors of fall, yellow, red, brown. There's much more Turkish spoken here than in Krichim. I don't understand much since the dialect spoken here is different from the academic Turkish I've been learning...so, it's a bit intimidating and yet exotic and interesting at the same time. That's it for now.

Be happy, dear reader, and i'll do the same.

"Know that you don't know and everything will be revealed to you." unknown